Friday, December 07, 2012

Fiction Friday: Terms & Conditions

Here’s a
thought experiment: Take five intelligent, reasonably attractive
twenty-somethings and put them in a vehicle together. Give them reasonably
clear instructions and ridiculously broad parameters of acceptable damages.
Tell them they’re under the best legal protection money can buy, tell them to
get the job done at (almost) any cost, tell them to go ahead and enjoy
themselves once in a while, and set them loose. If you don’t see chaos coming,
you have a far more optimistic outlook than I do. In hindsight, I just thank
God we were limited to one continent.
Michael’s father gave his
children two choices when it came time to take their place in the company. They
could either a) get fitted for suits straight out of school and start working
in a cushy office environment with every amenity; or they could b) start in the
field and work their way up to the top from there. To hear Michael tell it, it
wasn’t a hard choice; if he was to be co-executive someday, he wanted to
understand what everyone under him would experience. Good leaders, he (somewhat
drunkenly) explained to us once, are never too good to join their men in the
trenches.
To hear Rosemarie tell it,
Michael wanted to put off wearing a tie to work for as long as humanly
possible. His rebuttal: “Okay, yeah, that. But the other stuff too.”
They both agreed that if they
were going to do field work, they were going to go all out: Odd (really
odd) jobs, obscure locations, difficult cargo, stuff that nobody else would do
without overtime or hazard pay. (Occasionally that translated to spring
vacations in Italian villas -- them’s the perks when you’re family – but not as
often as any of us would have liked.) Building a team was Rosemarie’s idea,
based on about a year’s worth of work with her brother. Michael could make
plans all day long but tended to lose his head if something went sideways in
the middle of an assignment. Rosemarie did fine on the fly, but she could (and
once or twice did) get lost walking to the corner and back without step-by-step
directions and a list of major landmarks.
I never learned specifically
who else they recruited that first go-around, but apparently I was one of four
who passed both the overt (“oops, there goes the map”) and unspoken (“No need
to mention this to the others”) tests. I was one of only two who called
afterward. Despite the lack of a formal interview, I guess I made a good
impression; Rosemarie in particular seemed pretty pleased it was me that got
the job. I had to agree with her. It wasn’t what I’d planned to do after
college, mostly because I didn’t have any plans at all. But it certainly beat
sitting in a cubicle with a cup of burnt chain-store coffee, slowly developing
carpal tunnel and wishing I’d gone for a STEM degree instead of a bachelor’s in
English Lit.
We did well, the three of us,
but the arrival of Colin and Stephanie (and their respective skill sets) took
us up a level. AGATE made sure we were fully stocked with new equipment,
information and supplies. We started getting sealed instructions with labels
like “eyes only” and “extreme discretion”. We had a comfortable budget and minimal
oversight. We had those little two way radios that hide on your shirt collar or
in your ear. We had code names, for God’s sake: Shotgun. Forward. Boomtown.
Houston. Michael and Rosemarie’s personal project was now a full-fledged asset
protection and recovery team. And when Michael announced our official title,
our unanimous response was, “We’re a what now?”

It
shouldn’t have been too surprising. AGATE was a backronym for Asset Gain And
Transport Experts. Rosemarie told me that her dad started the company as a
kitchen and bathroom supply store -- fixtures, cabinets, things like that. The
name came from the unusual stone he used for custom countertops. When he had
extra space in the truck during delivery runs, he’d sell it to whoever needed
something hauled across town, barely any questions asked. When he realize he
was making more money shipping packages than he was selling fancy plumbing
fixtures, he sold the storefront and switched over completely to discrete
shipping for the discerning client.
Our team’s new title came with
a new scope of operations: Instead of just picking up items ready for
transport, we were now authorized to do the fetching ourselves. If a client in Massachusetts
needed a file from his vacation home in Malibu, we would enter the premises and
get it for him. Easy enough: Show up with the work order, get the key from the
landlord or ask the housekeeper if we could pretty please go into the den and
root around until we found it. We got in, we got out, we handed the objective
to a waiting rapid-transit team, and for the most part that was that. Easy
peasy, livin’ greasy, unless ...
... the objective was stored
by someone other than the client, and that someone didn’t want the client to
have it. AGATE’s legal department required clients to establish legitimate
ownership of the file/photos/object d’art/whatever (or else prove malicious
intent on the part of the actual owner), so I had no problems there, ethically
speaking. It got fuzzy when we learned retrieval meant waiting until dark and
dressing all in black and scaling fences, or seducing an office manager and
stealing his keys, or just plain lying our asses off until we got the access we
needed. Colin and Rosemarie turned out to be particularly talented at the
second and third options. Stephanie was disturbingly practiced at the first,
especially when it came to dealing with dogs. We chose not to dig too deep into
her records.
One thing that didn’t change
was that when a job was in motion, I sat in the back of the van with my charts
and schedules and equipment, a different color pen behind each ear and two more
holding up my hair, listening to the others on the radios and relaying
instructions as needed. Sometimes Michael stayed in with me, depending on the
job, which was nice. Two people on the mics means one of you can make a coffee
run or slip away to the bathroom if you need it. It’s those little details, the
ones you never see in movies, that make or break an assignment. Overlook those,
and they can really cause you problems.
I don’t watch that kind of
movie anymore.